Seduce and Destroy, Revisited

It's safe to say that we're all somewhat bewildered by Tom Cruise's recent antics during his marathon War of the Worlds junket. Nobody has ever had a more eventful, controversial and downright bizzare promotional campaign for a film. Let's ignore for a moment the Katie Holmes seduction, the red carpet water-squirting incident and the out-of-left-field Brooke Shields diss. What would posess a respected, charming, wildly popular superstar to suddenly proclaim himself a pharmeceutical expert and start offering psychiatric advice during interviews? This morning, while watching a clip of his trainwreck Today show interview, it hit me: Tom Cruise has morphed into his Frank "T.J." Mackey character from Magnolia.

In the best performance of his career, Cruise played a pompous, evangelical infomercial host who hawked the "Seduce and Destroy" technique for attracting women. There's scene about half an hour into the movie, in which Mackey sits down for an interview with a female TV reporter. In the interview, Mackey is over the top, intentionally controversial and even jumps on his chair for shock value. The similarities to Cruise's real-life Oprah interview are eerie. The only difference now is that War of the Worlds is the infomercial he's promoting and Scientology is "Seduce and Destroy." It's only a matter of time before he snaps into Collateral mode and goes on a killing spree.